The right words to boost your Kickstarter pitch

Thinking of crowdfunding your start-up? Then don't make potential contributors feel guilty if they don't cough up some cash. Instead, couch your pitches in language that makes clear that those investing in a project will be rewarded with freebies like T-shirts and discounted purchasing deals on the product when it hits the market.

Those are just two of the messages to emerge from a detailed linguistic analysis of tens of thousands of successful and unsuccessful pitches posted on the Kickstarter crowdfunding website during 2012.

After noticing that some projects fail to get funded even after attracting positive media attention at launch, researchers Tanushree Mitra and Eric Gilbert at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta wondered if the way a pitch is written, rather than the inventiveness of the project or the quality of the video explaining the idea, play a role in hitting funding targets.

What really got them interested was the vast disparity between the fate of a pitch for funding a videogame called Ninja Baseball and the pitch for the Pebble smartwatch. While the game sought $10,000 and got positive media backing it only raised one-third of what it needed and, as Kickstarter is an all-or-nothing play, it got nothing. Yet Pebble sought $100,000 and has so far received $10 million, with $2.6 million of that coming in just three days.

"With such huge discrepancies we wondered what kind of insights we could find," says Mitra. So they used data-mining software to download the pitches from 45,000 Kickstarter projects – 52 per cent of which got funded – and analysed 9 million phrases used to persuade would-be pledgers to part with their money.

I'll scratch your back

They compiled two lists: the top 100 words or short phrases that signalled a project would likely be funded and a top 100 suggesting it would not. Mitra says phrases suggesting strong "reciprocity" signalled successful funding. "Those campaigns which follow the concept of reciprocity – that is, offer a gift in return for a pledge – generated the greatest amount of funding," says Gilbert.

On the downside, phrases suggesting the project would be in trouble if the pledger did not cough up, fared badly, with phrases beginning with "even a dollar" often signalling funding failure – such as "even a dollar short", "even a dollar will" and "even a dollar can". In their paper, which will be presented at a crowdsourcing conference in Baltimore, Maryland, in mid-February, the researchers say this reads as unattractive "grovelling for money".

Kickstarter, based in New York, has not yet digested the study, though a spokesman described the work as "thoughtful". The site is a tremendous success, collecting $480 million in cash pledges in 2013 alone from 3 million people.

Tom Walkinshaw, founder of nanosatellite start-up PocketQube of Glasgow, UK, which was successfully funded on Kickstarter and which now has four nanosatellites in Earth orbit, welcomed the research.

"Crowdfunding at present is a bit like the internet in 1995. Everyone agrees it could be really game-changing, but there is a real lack of in-depth knowledge on why some campaigns work while others just fizzle out. This is very interesting research and could undoubtedly be beneficial to both crowdfunding hopefuls and new crowdfunding platforms," Walkinshaw says.

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